Editorial

16th April 2000

Mindless aggression

Mindless aggression claimed more victims this New Year than violence between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan armed forces, and drunken brawls accounted for the most number of deaths.

That being the absurd reality of the season in retrospect, it's worth reconsidering some of the strategies that we have cooked up to isolate this tendency of purposeless aggression that rears its ugly head with most countrywide celebrations. Considering that there was a total ban on liquor sales on the two important holidays related to the Sinhala New Year, we need to ask where all this liquor came from in the first place? Hooch? Or was it the stockpiles? Or just "raa'', that convenient brew for lotus - eaters who are vary anyway of licensed authorized concoctions?

How the liquor got into the hands of revellers (or spoilsports ?) is almost academic, relative to the larger issues of how absurdly incomprehensible our society has become in the last couple of years. Incomprehensible , because civil society will have no explanation for drunken brawls that claim lives, though there will be reams of information for instance, on how the ethnic war persists in our midst. Civil society will talk about war and combat over a drink — maybe over cocktails with a five star dinner, maybe at the end of one of those grandiloquently edifying seminars on the conflict. But, issues which are not academically stylish, will not be touched with a bargepole in any of these rarefied conclaves.

That sort of academic snootiness is vapid and quite useless. Leadership elements in society have to instead take a hard look at society's peripheral problems. Granted that crime and drunkenness, are old realities as old as the oldest professions. But, it's not the crimes and the brawls per se that sound the alarms. It's the depravity that's seen in most of the new wave of crimes, and the new dimension of callousness that's seen in incidents such as holiday brawls.

If we media pundits, preachers and pressmen at large are allowed to pat ourselves on the back once in a while, now is the time to do it because Dr. Hector Weerasinghe of the National Hospital has said the media deserved the applause for the waning incidence of firecracker casualties. Though the elongated "nonagatha, '' or the period of quiet that's meant to precede the New Year may have had something to do with this year's reduced casualty rate , there is no second - guessing the fact that the press is a powerful player in dinning some sense into the horde. Ban the crackers, said another doctor, but let that debate be taken up at another time and place. Suffice to say, for the moment, that the proposition should enter into the serious societal discourse if the problem of firecracker injuries resurrects, with the next couple of celebrations. The recorded figures of firecracker casualties this year show that something can be done, if civil society does take a breather from discussing the weightier, albeit important issues of war and peace. Petty squabbles and gossipy vendettas between society's "wannabes'' seem to dominate the thrust and parry in the newspapers, which is all very entertaining sometimes, but is otherwise mostly hot air and no substance.

Newspapers can be put to a better and healthier use, and if society is degenerating, that's not necessarily boring, because there are people out there with bright ideas on how to stem the sickening slide. Let's hear them for a change, so that people who don't have a stake in anything except making things a little better all - round, can do something useful about some painfully real problems.

The Political Column